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The Champions League remains football’s biggest stage for elite stars. Kylian Mbappe, Harry Kane and Lamine Yamal will all be dreaming of lifting the trophy in 2027.

But in the opening weeks especially, the competition also has a brilliant habit of bringing back players we had almost stopped thinking about. This season is no different, with former Chelsea, Tottenham, Newcastle and West Ham men unexpectedly popping up again.

We’ve picked out some of the forgotten names set to feature in Champions League football in 2026-27.

We had a soft spot for the Game of Thrones extra from Croatia’s golden generation. They really do not make them like that anymore.

Considering he was left out of Croatia’s 2026 World Cup squad, we had more or less assumed he had quietly called it a day. But the centre-back is still going strong at 37, having made more than 100 appearances for AEK Athens since joining the club in 2022.

Dinamo Zagreb. Dynamo Kyiv. Besiktas. AEK Athens. He really does love being part of the early Champions League group or league phase cannon fodder.

A special mention, too, for former Real Madrid flop Luka Jovic, who will spearhead the attack for the Greek Super League side.

The Saudi Pro League has now been around long enough for us to get used to players heading there for a quick payday before trying to revive their careers in Europe. Jordan Henderson, Gabri Veiga and Aymeric Laporte are just a few examples.

But we genuinely thought we had seen the last of N’Golo Kante when he left Chelsea for Al-Ittihad in 2023. Well into his thirties and clearly no longer at his peak, with little left to prove in European club football, it seemed his only task was to pile up money in Jeddah like Scrooge McDuck.

That assumption was badly wrong. Kante returned to Europe in January and was even included in Didier Deschamps’ Les Bleus squad for the 2026 World Cup.

To be fair, this list could easily have been made up entirely of Fenerbahce players. Ederson! Nathan Ake! Milan Skriniar! Nelson Semedo! Marco Asensio! Romelu Lukaku! This may well be the ultimate Turkish Super Lig mix-and-match collection.

Perennial Super Lig champions Galatasaray are not far behind Fenerbahce on that front either.

Alongside names such as Ilkay Gundogan, Leroy Sane, Rafael Leao, Lucas Torreira and Victor Osimhen — all very recognisable poster boys for the Turkish Super Lig in 2026 — there is also former Southampton and Wolves regular Mario Lemina.

The hard-tackling yellow-card magnet is actually in his second spell at Rams Park, having spent the 2019-20 season there on loan from Saints.

You may or may not remember the 6’7” beanpole striker scoring exactly two Premier League goals in 13 appearances for Wolves.

He spent four years on Wolves’ books and only left permanently this summer, joining LASK after appearing on loan during their Austrian double-winning campaign last season.

LASK met Vida’s AEK in their opener. A duel straight out of Westeros, that one.

We do enjoy a less conventional career path.

Florian Thauvin had two excellent spells at Marseille either side of a far less memorable stint with Newcastle United. After that, he spent two years in Mexico with Tigres UANL before becoming something of a cult figure at Udinese.

He joined Lens last summer and turned out to be a surprisingly important part of a side that pushed PSG in the Ligue 1 title race, and he can count himself genuinely unfortunate to have missed out on Deschamps’ France squad in the summer.

The 33-year-old winger has already scored three goals in three matches for Lens this season and will be eager to get going after a relatively kind league phase draw featuring Slavia Prague, Sporting Lisbon, Club Brugge, Como and RB Leipzig, before tougher assignments against Liverpool and Manchester City after Christmas.

Tottenham once “sold Elvis and signed The Beatles”, and that now feels like a different lifetime.

From that strange collection of Gareth Bale replacements, Erik Lamela, Nacer Chadli, Roberto Soldado, Paulinho, Etienne Capoue and Vlad Chiriches have all retired, while the last man standing, Christian Eriksen, is now clearly in the twilight of his career in Germany’s second tier with Wolfsburg.

We seem to have convinced ourselves through a Mandela effect that Nabil Bentaleb was part of that exact group as well.

In reality, he was an academy graduate who was breaking through around the same time the not-so-magnificent seven arrived.

That helps explain why the Algerian is still only 31 and appears to have plenty left to offer. Like Eriksen, he made an unlikely return to football after suffering a heart attack.

He is now in his fourth season at Lille and his second consecutive Champions League campaign with the club, where he shares the dressing room with Kylian Mbappe’s younger brother Ethan, former Southampton left-back Romain Perraud and a 39-year-old(!) Olivier Giroud.

Suddenly, we are feeling very nostalgic about mid-2010s Tottenham.

The Austrian centre-back spent his best years drifting around without ever truly making much of an impact.

He was on Stoke City’s books for four years, and loan spells at Hannover, Mouscron and Karlsruher SC produced very little of note before he headed back to Austria with Rapid Wien.

Since then, he has found stability at Slovan Bratislava, where the last three years have delivered three Slovak league titles.

We could have sworn Ivan Perisic was close to retiring when Spurs signed him as a battle-hardened veteran. That was four years ago.

The Croatia mainstay suffered an ACL injury during his spell at Tottenham, and a return to his boyhood club Hajduk Split looked certain to be the final chapter of his career.

Very little came from that move in the end, and his contract was terminated by mutual consent before an unlikely late-career revival with PSV.

He has won back-to-back Eredivisie titles with Peter Bosz’s thrilling side and is once again preparing for Champions League football. We included him in last year’s version of this feature and he keeps proving us right.

Last season, Jan Bednarek — along with Wout Faes, oddly on loan at Monaco — filled the classic ‘what are you doing here?!’ role in UEFA competition, with the Polish defender featuring in the Europa League.

And, in fairness to him, he has handled it rather well. After a fairly hapless spell in the Premier League, Bednarek was by all accounts excellent as Porto won the Primeira Liga title last season.

So we are now more or less used to seeing Bednarek at this level. Andre Silva, though, may take a little longer to get used to.

The well-travelled European forward is back at his boyhood club after most recently enduring an underwhelming spell with La Liga relegation strugglers Elche.

Manuel Pellegrini’s Verdiblancos have assembled a wonderfully entertaining squad. Republic of Ireland hero Troy Parrott is there alongside roulette king Antony, questionable Bielsa-era Leeds signings Marc Roca, Diego Llorente and Junior Firpo, plus football’s most sustainability-minded socialist Hector Bellerin.

There is also the ever-cheerful former West Ham favourite Pablo Fornals. Lovely stuff all round.